Sales Automation, Clone Boxes, Stats Style, and Extra Orifices

Duplicate SSH Keys Everywhere — It looks like all devices with the fingerprint are Dropbear SSH instances that have been deployed by Telefonica de Espana. It appears that some of their networking equipment comes set up with SSH by default, and the manufacturer decided to reuse the same operating system image across all devices.

Style.ONS — UK govt style guide covers the elements of writing about statistics. It aims to make statistical content more open and understandable, based on editorial research and best practice. (via Hadley Beeman)

Warren Ellis on the Apple Watch — I, personally, want to put a gold chain on my phone, pop it into a waistcoat pocket, and refer to it as my “digital fob watch” whenever I check the time on it. Just to make the point in as snotty and high-handed a way as possible: This is the decadent end of the current innovation cycle, the part where people stop having new ideas and start adding filigree and extra orifices to the stuff we’ve got and call it the future.

Move Fast, Break Nothing (Zach Holman) — Gartner talks about “web-scale IT”, but I think the processes and tools for putting code into product (devops) are far more transformative than the technology that scales the product delivery.

Maximum Happy Imagination (Matt Jones) — questioning the true vision of Marc Andreessen’s recent Twitter discourse on the great future that awaits us. His analogies run out in the 20th century when it comes to the political, social and economic implications of his maximum happy imagination.

The Mirrortocracy — It’s astonishing how many of the people conducting interviews and passing judgement on the careers of candidates have had no training at all on how to do it well. Aside from their own interviews, they may not have ever seen one. I’m all for learning on your own but at least when you write a program wrong it breaks. Without a natural feedback loop, interviewing mostly runs on myth and survivor bias.

Available Data, Goal Setting, Real Tech, and Gamification Numbers

Dynamo and BigTable — good preso overview of two approaches to solving availability and consistency in the event of server failure or network partition.

Goals Gone Wild (PDF) — In this article, we argue that the beneficial effects of goal setting have been overstated and that systematic harm caused by goal setting has been largely ignored. We identify specific side effects associated with goal setting, including a narrow focus that neglects non-goal areas, a rise in unethical behavior, distorted risk preferences, corrosion of organizational culture, and reduced intrinsic motivation.

Tech Isn’t All Brogrammers (Alexis Madrigal) — a reminder that there are real scientists and engineers in Silicon Valley working on problems considerably harder than selling ads and delivering pet food to one another. (via Brian Behlendorf)

Game Patterns, What Next, GPU vs CPU, and Privacy with Sensors

Search for the Next Platform (Fred Wilson) — Mobile is now the last thing. And all of these big tech companies are looking for the next thing to make sure they don’t miss it.. And they will pay real money (to you and me) for a call option on the next thing.

Privacy in Sensor-Driven Human Data Collection (PDF) — see especially the section “Attacks Against Privacy”. More generally, it is often the case the data released by researches is not the source of privacy issues, but the unexpected inferences that can be drawn from it. (via Pete Warden)

Sintering Patent Expires Today — key patent expires, though there are others in the field. Sintering is where the printer fuses powder with a laser, which produces smooth surfaces and works for ceramics and other materials beyond plastic. Hope is that sintering printers will see same massive growth that FDM (current tech) printers saw after the FDM patent expired 5 years ago.

Under the Hood of Team Obama’s Tech Operation (Mother Jones) — The new platform allowed OFA to collect feedback from the ground on an enormous scale, and respond accordingly. In short, it made the flow of information bidirectional. “What it did was it listened, and it trickled up information.”

Surprisingly Undervalued Books — I’m not necessarily talking about obscure books/authors here. I’m talking about the ratio of how good the book is to how good you expect it to be. These are the outliers, the ones that most people don’t talk about very much or haven’t heard of, and yet turn out to be profoundly brilliant.

SoundSlice — Adrian Holovaty’s new tool to help transcribe music from YouTube videos.

Canada Wages War on Knowledge — Library and Archives Canada is ending acquisitions, not digitizing material, dispersing its collection to underfunded private and public collections around Canada, and providing little in the way of access to the scraps they did keep. Apparently Canada has been overrun by Huns and Vandals. Imminent sack of Toronto predicted. (via BoingBoing)

Cyberpunk Dress Code (BoingBoing) — what caught my eye was how many gadgets have been subsumed into the mobile phone.

Brief Intro to TPCK and SAMR (PDF) — slides from a workshop framing technology in education. SAMR particularly good: technology first Substitutes, then Augments (substitutes and improves), then Modifies (changing the task), and then finally Redefines (makes entirely new tasks possible).

Virtual CDRW — awesome Mac tool: gives you a fake CD/RW drive so when you have to play the burn/rip game to get music out of DRM, you don’t have to waste plastic.

California and Bust (Vanity Fair) — Michael Lewis digs into city and state finances, and the news ain’t good.

Tonido Plug 2 — with only watts a day, you could have your own low-cost compute farm that runs off a car battery and a cheap solar panel.

William Gibson Interview (The Paris Review) — It’s harder to imagine the past that went away than it is to imagine the future. What we were prior to our latest batch of technology is, in a way, unknowable. It would be harder to accurately imagine what New York City was like the day before the advent of broadcast television than to imagine what it will be like after life-size broadcast holography comes online. But actually the New York without the television is more mysterious, because we’ve already been there and nobody paid any attention. That world is gone.

Zen and the Art of Making (Phil Torrone) — thoughts on the difference between beginners and experts, and why the beginner’s mindset is intoxicating and addictive.

Hacked Watch, Hackable Watch, Alpha Biogeeks, and a Tech Sweet Spot

Telling Time with Open Realtime Data — Sony Ericsson MBW-150 bluetooth watch, showing the next few SF Muni bus arrival times for a nearby stop. The code to fetch the arrival times is running on my Droid phone, and communicating with the watch using Marcel Dopita’s OpenWatch software for the Android platform. This is a neat hack, and reminds us that every object on our person could be programmed. (via Brian Jepson)

Developing Bioinformatics Methods — the best method developers, in general, are those people who are both developers and users of their own methods. Regardless of what field you’re in, look for the alpha geeks: those who have both a problem and the means to solve it.

How to Innovate Using Existing Technology (Caterina Fake) — interesting observation, that there’s a sweet spot between “just a feature” and “needs ten years of basic research in academia” to get something that’s defensible, useful, and achievable with the means of a startup. I’m a big fan of augmented human skill: using computers to make humans more effective at doing what humans are good at.

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The growing role of software architects: “Architecture has become much more interesting now because it’s become more encompassing," says Neal Ford, software architect and meme wrangler at ThoughtWorks.